Sunday, December 7, 2014

Education programming 101: destroy logic

Once upon a time, in medieval universities, new students enrolled in
the Trivium. It was the foundation curriculum. It was required. Its
parts were: grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

Grammar: the interior construction of language.

Logic: the valid and invalid connections in the course of a formal
argument; the method of proper reasoning; the deductive links in a
chain, at the end of which appears a conclusion.

Rhetoric: oral and written presentation; the use of language to make a
case; the capacity to persuade, even in the face of counter-argument.

Today, the subject matter of the Trivium is not only downplayed. It has been shattered.

This article focuses on the death of logic in schools.

When the intensive handling of ideas is seen as a laughable goal for
education, indoctrination is plugged in as the only alternative.

The mind of the student shifts from being an active force to being a container.

The destruction of logic perverts rational thought at its core and inserts ideology masked as insight.

The actual meaning of an idea is firmly placed on the back burner. Instead? Praise or attack the people who forward ideas.

This strategy has gained great prominence.

“The revered Founders of the Republic? Shysters, con men,
slaveholders, monopolists who saw rebellion from England as the way to
win greater power for themselves, at the expense of everyone else living
on American soil.”

Therefore, the argument continues, and this is crucial, the Founders’
IDEAS, as expressed in the Declaration and the Constitution, were
rotten to the core. The ideas can be dismissed out of hand as coming
from “a bad source.”

Ideas no longer need to be judged on their sense, merit, and
alignment with basic principles. Nor are they judged by their position
in a well-formed argument. All that is out. Now, you only have to
“look to the source” and make ALL your decisions based on “who these
people really were who expressed the ideas.”
And since that’s the case, learning to think or reason is unnecessary.

In logic, this used to be called the fallacious ad hominem argument.
Now it’s not called anything. It’s praised as the insightful way to do
intellectual business.

One by one, core ideas fall to the ax, and finally they cease to exist at all.

(To argue that very bad people have taken over an idea, and therefore
the idea itself was never good, is like arguing that, since hijackers
took over a plane, the plane was a despicable object altogether and
probably deserved to be stolen or blown up.)

You might be surprised by the number of people who believe that the
value of an idea depends entirely on who expressed the idea. If the
wrong person first expressed it, it was never worthy.

Students with a vast sense of self-entitlement and meaningless
self-esteem love this strategy. It allows them to parade around and
call the shots and decide which ideas are important and which aren’t,
without reflection. They have a scorecard of good guys and bad guys and
that’s all they need.

In our teaching institutions, you could look in vain to find courses
on the individual, his freedom, his power. That’s gone. It’s no
accident that serious training in logic is also gone. And by serious, I
mean the application of logic to formal arguments on issues that
determine our future.

In many cases, instead, education is about: what group do you belong
to? What are the needs of that group? Who is oppressing your group?
How can you get government to solve the problem?

If you can educate the young to make snap judgments about core ideas, you eliminate their capacity to reason. You own them.

From that point on, they hold a hostile attitude toward anyone who
can discuss and analyze ideas. They look at such people as an entitled
and privileged class who is speaking a foreign language.

In order to engage in meaningful debate, people have to be able to
recognize a train of thought and follow it. If they can’t, because they
were educated not to, where are we? We’re in the dark. We’re living
by slogans.

Freedom? Liberty? Collective need? Responsibility? It doesn’t
matter what ideas are on the table, because the overwhelming number of
people don’t know what an idea is. They don’t know how to walk up to
one and look at it from several sides. They don’t know how to trace its
implications. They don’t know how to fit that idea alongside its
cousins. They don’t see a Whole. They see the ceaseless spinning
machinery of an alien process, from which they’ve been excluded.

Then, no matter what shape society takes, it’s a dumb-show, as far the majority of its citizens are concerned.

Who solves that?

The invasive State takes charge. It picks up the pieces of the wreckage it was a key actor in delivering.

The goal of educating citizens about what it means to take part in a
Republic has been blunted. This was done, a step at a time, through
education.

Dismantling the ability to reason, employ logic, and handle ideas was the prow of that destructive campaign.

The first steps are the hardest. But when a student suddenly sees
that world open up to him, when the lights go on, when information that
was formerly a blur and a blob snaps into place as a recognizably
logical (or illogical) sequence, when the student’s aimless wandering
mind suddenly focuses with power…when he knows that he knows…the rewards
are self-evident.

Quotes

"There is beauty in truth, even if it's painful. Those who lie, twist life so that it looks tasty to the lazy, brilliant to the ignorant, and powerful to the weak. But lies only strengthen our defects. They don't teach us anything, help anything, fix anything or cure anything. Nor do they develop one's character, one's mind, one's heart or one's soul." Jose Harris

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